My coworker sent me a list of the top 10 smartest dog breeds. I've seen these before, but this new list was very interesting. It included Australian Kelpie, Beauceron, and Belgian Malinois! Of course, I can't find the list now that I've deleted his email, but I found this. It's the same breeds. I don't know if the order is the same. http://www.petside.com/article/smartest-dog-breeds

Eh, those lists just separate handler oriented dogs from independent "cat-like" dogs. You wouldn't put a border collie and a cat next to each other and say the cat is stupid because it doesn't do all the tricks the border collie does. Same thing with an afghan hound.

People have a really bad habit of judging another animal's intelligence by how much they want to please us. They're completely different traits.

Agreed! Ruffian and Tonka were my Shibas, Ruffian was the more trainable of the two, food motivated so she would pray, play dead, anything, if food was involved. Tonka was not, he didn't care two flips what I wanted him to do...also never had a fence that he couldn't find his way out of either, never by jumping either, he would climb, dig squeeze or slide anything. One place he dug under my trailer and pushed the skirting out...he was far from stupid, but at best he would sit when asked.

It always makes me all kinds of angry when I see those lists, and especially when I see borzois on the "dumb" part.

Strider was never trained to alert to my blood sugar. He figured that out on his own.

He was also never trained to respond to my blood sugar getting low. All by himself, with his stoopid little borzoi brain, he realized there was a connection between my blood sugar getting low and my blood sugar improving when I ate food.

He started alerting to my blood sugar, and I'd be like, "hey thanks dude." Then if I didn't eat something right away, he'd get antsy, run into the kitchen, and grab some food and come drop it in my lap. Usually it was an apple or banana.

He then took it a step further, and realized that if my blood sugar is low AND I'm sad, chocolate makes me feel better. So if I'm distressed, he brings me chocolate.

I NEVER trained him to do any of that. I reinforced him with praise when he offered the behavior, and that was good enough for him to continue helping me out. I dare anybody who thinks they know better to say that borzois are stupid, because Kaia is every bit as clever as he is. They're both incredible at generalizing, which from what I understand is really challenging for most dogs.

IME, those primitive and independent breeds show themselves to be exceedingly intelligent when people actually put in the effort to work with them in a way that compliments their drives and attitudes.